Actor Kevin Bacon doesn’t just play a working musician on TV or in the movies – he actually is one. And a pretty darned decent one at that.

Kevin Bacon sings at SteelStacks Levitt Pavilion on Saturday

Bacon and his brother, Michael, who together perform as light rockers The Bacon Brothers, on Saturday were at ArtsQuest’s SteelStacks campus for the 25th annual Muscular Dystrophy Association Ride for Life, which continues today.

But the Bacon Brothers didn’t just play a concert.

In the spirit of the famous trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, here are the six degrees of Kevin Bacon (and brother Michael’s) contribution to the MDA Ride for Life event:

1. The concert: Of course, the biggest contribution was the concert the duo, backed by a five-man band, played at the Levitt Pavilion at SteelStacks for an audience of about 500. It was no small contribution. The duo has played venues such as Carnegie Hall and recently sold out two shows at Sellersville Theater 1894. They get around, from town to town.

Bacon Brothers Michael, left, and Kevin playing at Levitt Pavilion

They played a show that opened with “Grey-Green Eyes” from their 1997 album “Forosoco,” the first of the seven (!) they have released. The song was folk-rock, starting a concert that covered genres including folk, 1960s garage rock, funky R&B and more.

On it, Michael Bacon played guitar and sand, and Kevin played bongos. He later also played guitar, and warm harmonica on “Whole Lot of Shade.”

He also sang – even reaching for falsetto on the funky “Go My Way (The iPod Song),” and perhaps best on the garage-rock “I’m So Glad I’m Not Married,” on which he wailed with gusto. The band also was hot on that song, with good guitar.

As a singer, Kevin Bacon’s no great talent, but he’s well above most celebrity singers – perhaps at the level of a top-notch bar band.

The concert lasted more than an hour and more than a dozen songs.

2. Extra effort on the concert: The band could easily have given a cursory show, but actually seemed to make a strong effort. They coaxed about half the 500 people in the audience to move their chairs much closer to the stage, and both Bacons engaged the crowd between songs.

After “I’m So Glad I’m Not Married,” Kevin said he thought that song would become a hit and have people wondering “which actress I wrote it about. But it didn’t become a hit, so nobody cares.” He said the song “Kikko’s Song” also was written “about an actress, but I married her” – referring to his now 24-year marriage to Kyra Sedgewick.

“Thanks for all of you coming out for this wonderful cause,” he told the crowd. “We’re happy to be here in beautiful Bethlehem.”

3. Sang with former MDA national ambassador Abbey Umali: The Bacons spent part of the day rehearsing with 13-year-old Abbey, who has Charcot-Marie Tooth disease, and their band for her to join them onstage for a concert-ending duet.

“She’s a great singer – she picked the key and we’re really just filling in,” Kevin Bacon said with a laugh at a news conference with Abbey earlier in the day. “She’s sung with Darius Rucker at the Grand Old Opry, so she’s slumming now.”

4. Meet and greet: The Bacons also did a meet-and-greet with about 50 people, mostly Harley Davidson dealers – Harley Davidson is a sponsor of Ride For Life – including Mike Kennedy, the company’s senior vice president of North American Sales. They politely shook hands, thanked the people and posed for pictures – including flexing their biceps repeatedly for photos that illustrated MDA’s Make a Muscle, Make a Difference campaign.

5. MDA public service announcements: The brothers also shot several public service announcements. Michael Bacon said the brothers got involved because MDA “is a great organization,” and when their agent proposed the event – halfway between Philadelphia and New York for the Philadelphia-native Bacons (Michael Bacon maintains a home in Phoenixville), they said they jumped at it.

6. Media interviews: The brothers also gave media interviews. Kevin Bacon, as performers usually do, remarked about SteelStacks’ stunning blast furnace backdrop. “It really looks like a movies set,” he said. “Did they ever shoot anything here?” Told that scenes from “Transformer 2” were, indeed, filmed there, he said, “We play a lot of different places, but nothing like this.”

And the actor, who starred in such movies as “Animal House,” “Diner,” “Footloose,” “Flatliners,” “A Few Good Men,” “JFK,” “Apollo 13,” “Hollow Man,” “Mystic River” and “Friday the 13th” and won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, endured a reporter’s smart-aleck question:

“When are you going to give up this silly dream of being an actor and concentrate on your music,” I asked.

Glad you enjoyed the Bros and their band! They're a bunch of great guys who put on a terrific show. The BBs are like a favorite bar band in that everyone's drawn in by their combination of folk, rock, soul, and country (hence "Forosoco," the title of their first CD), but they'd beat the pants off a bar band any day. Always a fun time!

If you attend a Bacon Brothers show no doubt when you leave you are a Bacon Brothers fan! The guys backing them in the band are great! If you missed the concert head on over to you tube and look up The Bacon Brothers. There are some fun clips of their shows!

Posted By: Debbie | May 7, 2012 1:36:51 AM

This is my first time to visit here, I find the blog is very interesting. Thanks for share it.

I just search once found this article, the article is very good, I see the growth of many insights, hope to write some articles blogger for everyone to learn, here special thanks to blogger of hard writing.

Through this blog I to Kevin Bacon, Bacon Brothers Michael learned something, they to music hobby and contribution, let I admire, hope blogger can some of this article published. Thank you for sharing.

The comments to this entry have been closed.

JOHN J. MOSER has been around long enough to have seen the original Ramones in a small club in New Jersey, U2 from the fourth row of a theater and Bob Dylan's born-again tours. But he also has the number for All-American Rejects' Nick Wheeler on his cell phone, wrote the first story ever done on Jack's Mannequin and hung out in Wiz Khalifa's hotel room.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

JODI DUCKETT: As The Morning Call's assistant features editor responsible for entertainment, she spends a lot of time surveying the music landscape and sizing up the Valley's festivals and club scene. She's no expert, but enjoys it all — especially artists who resonated in her younger years, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tracy Chapman, Santana and Joni Mitchell.

KATHY LAUER-WILLIAMS enjoys all types of music, from roots rock and folk to classical and opera. Music has been a constant backdrop to her life since she first sat on the steps listening to her mother’s Broadway LPs when she was 2. Since becoming a mother herself, she has become well-versed on the growing genre of kindie rock and, with her son in tow, can boast she has seen a majority of the current kid’s performers from Dan Zanes to They Might Be Giants.

STEPHANIE SIGAFOOS: A Jersey native raised in Northeast PA, she was reared in a house littered with 8-tracks, 45s and cassette tapes of The Beatles, Elvis, Meatloaf and Billy Joel. She also grew up on the sounds of Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw and can be found traversing the countryside in search of the sounds of a steel guitar. A fan of today's 'new country,' she digs mainstream/country-pop crossovers like Lady Antebellum and Sugarland and other artists that illustrate the genre's diversity.